SOA and Social Business

Electronic Social Networking Services like Facebook are very popular.The distinction between Social Networks services and similar Business services like Linkedin are not clear. Businesses use Facebook for commercial purposes and sometimes Linkedin users use it for social purposes. The identity of services such as Twitter is not clear as well: it is used for commercial and for social purposes. 


Usage of Social Networking Services in an Enterprise context is not as simple as using it in a Consumer context.  Google's Steve Yege's post published incidentally to an external Google+ circle instead of internal circle (including only Google's employees), is an illustration of issues facing an Enterprise using a Social Networking Service.


The differences between Enterprise Social Networking Services are similar to the differences between SOA Services (Enterprise context) and Mashups (Consumer context): Management and Security are essential in the Enterprise context. However, usage of Electronic Networking Services could be beneficial for enterprises.


IDC believes that curiosity in Social networking Services is turned into a business opportunity as the lines between Consumer and Enterprise continue to blur. 


In  an interesting Research Note titled: Becoming a Social Business: The IBM Story, IDC's  analysts Erin Traudt and Richard Vancil analyze one of the pioneers Social Businesses: IBM.


According to IDC's Social Business survey, Social Software usage moved beyond the Early Adopters stage. 41% of the participants in the survey conducts in September 2010 indicated that they already implemented Social Software. 


According to the IDC report, the major benefits of becoming a Social Business are:
1. Deeper relationships with customers, employees, partners and suppliers
2. Agility and Transparency
3. Higher employees' productivity and satisfaction
4. Increased engagement and feedback from customers
5. Accelerated Innovation and better intellectual capital reuse  


Social Networking Software is only an Enabler. An Organizational Culture transformation and Process changes are required in order to become a Social Business. According to IDC it is a long Journey.


Social Businesses and SOA
Usage of Web technologies as well as usage of SOA in Social Networking Software is not the important part connecting SOA and Social Networking Services. 


The important links between them are the following Organizational and Cultural constituents:

•   Sharing

SOA is about sharing Services or Service Reuse. Social Networks essence is sharing information. Sharing information by usage of Enterprise Social Networking Software can be used for analyzing and defining new SOA Services as well as for delivering information about existing Services to IT experts and Business users.

•  Cultural and Organizational Changes

 SOA initiative failure or success depends on Organizational, Cultural and Methodological factors. Adequate Maturity Level is a prerequisite.
A previous post is a link to my presentation titled: Methodological and Organizational aspects of SOA and BPM . The presentation explains why Methodological and Organizational aspects are more crucial for successful SOA implementation than pure technological aspects. Unfortunately, the presentation, presented in the Israeli Systems Analysts conference, is a Hebrew presentation. However, High Maturity Level and Reuse Culture are required for transforming a Business to Social Business, as well.  
IDC's opinion is: "A Social Business centers on "People as a Platform ...". This approach is very different from current approaches in most companies.  

• A Long Journey

Both SOA and Cultural Business are paradigmatic shift, requiring a long time and a lot of efforts and commitment. 

• Process Changes  

Expect Process changes as part of deployment of these paradigms.

• Agility 

Research results show that Agility is SOA's most important Value Proposition. Social Business is an Agile Business which is capable to change and adapt.

• Innovation

Innovation is another Value Proposition of SOA. 
Flexible Architecture Agile Enterprise as well as looking for similarities and commonalities between systems encourages Innovation.


Open Social interactions in a Social Business also enhance Innovation. Receiving feedback from employees, customers and partners could drive Innovation. 


Summary
 Although SOA is very different from Enterprise Social Networks, they share some basic principles and.
Both are driving more Agile and Innovative Business   

Not every acquisition is not a great idea

On May 2010 SAP acquired Sybase. According to my post titled: Acquisition is not simple: SAP-Sybase acquisition agreement, buying Sybase was not a great idea. If you would like to know why you can read my post.

Today (December 3rd 2011), SAP buys Successful Factors the provider of Cloud-based human resource management software, for  $3.4bn in cash. This time I would not argue that it is not a good idea.

Actually the last paragraph in my post about Sybase acquisition was titled: Which type of company I would acquire if I were Sap's CEO? Believe it or not, I recommended that "a successful SaaS applications company could be an adequate acquisition target". 


According to Financial Times, SuccessFactors Human Resources (HR) SaaS applications provider has 5 millions subscriptions at more than 3,500 companies worldwide and it is believed to be the second largest Cloud-based  provider of Enterprise software after Salesforce.com.
Lars Daalgard, SuccessFactors CEO will run SAP's Cloud business after the deal.


My Take
SuccessFactors products is a comprehensive HR SaaS suit including Workforce Planning,  Employee Life Cycle and Business Performance, Compensation Management, Career and Development Planning, Employee Profile, Reporting, Workforce Analytics, Recruitment etc. 


This acquisition is another evidence in the direction towards SaaS as a Mainstream approach for Business Applications.


Oracle's recent RightNow acquisition is another evidence. RightNow is a CRM vendor.


As far as ERP is concerned SaaS ERP evolution is on two axis: 


1. Type of Applications - First non-core ERP applications such as CRM and HR and only afterwards Core ERP applications such as Financials, Manufacturing and Production Planning etc.
SuccessFactors applications are HR applications.


2.  Enterprise Size - SMBs before large and complex enterprises.
SuccessFactors applications are used by Large Enterprises as well as by SMBs.


The SuccessFactors acquisition and its CEO Lars Daalgard's appointment as the manager of SAP's  Cloud business is an indication that SAP Business by Design  is a limited SaaS solution.

 

Will Microsoft survive until 2021? - Revisited again

In all Vendors Survival posts (e.g. Google, Apple, HP) I argued that no company will surely survive for a decade. People may think that I am wrong as far as a giant market leaders are concerned. However, I recently read two interesting articles about  a leading Virtual World company almost vanishing 5 years after its peak. The article is titled: Why Second Life failed?  


The second article is more surprising: it is about a giant company included in my Vendor Survival posts,  as well as in other posts. The company is: Microsoft.


On June 8th I wrote the post: Will Microsoft Survive until 2021? which discuss the possibility that Microsoft will not survive until 2021.
Less than a month prior to this post I wrote a post titled: Microsoft's Skype acquisition: Warning Signs ahead. The title depict my message: probably, Skype acquisition will not solve Microsoft's Mobile market challenges. 

The Business Insider's article titled: Steve Ballmer's Nightmare: How Microsoft's Business Actually Could Collapse presents extremer scenario than my Vendor's Survival post scenario. 
According to this scenario Microsoft's business could collapse soon. According to the article "many people in Silicon Valley are convinced that Microsoft is going to collapse Soon. Like in the next few years". 


This interesting article describes Microsoft's major challenges and also describes Microsoft's Billion USDs or more businesses. Yes, you guessed correctly the two major businesses are still Office and Windows. 


I recommend reading the interesting analysis presented in the article.

Vendors Survival: Will Google Survive until 2021? - Part 2

Searching the Web 
Search Engine is Google's most strategic product. Some of its other products are using it as component of the services they provide. 
Limitation or failure of it, as described in Why we desperately need a New (and Better) Google cited in part1 of this post, could negatively affect Google's market position.


This is a major challenge facing Google. Google has no control of some of the factors limiting its effectiveness.


Challenges in Searching the Web
The following bullets describe major Web Data problems, which could affect Web Search:

• The data is growing exponentially

The amount of data is growing fast. A Search Engine should handle larger amounts of pages and probably will find more and more number of pages in each search operation results list. 


Implications: Users will not read all entries in search results list. They will focus in the first entries. Search Engines results order should be accurate so users could identify the most relevant and important pages.

• No data Clean up Procedures    

Think of PC Files, Server Files, e-mail messages and 
Userids and Userids related information as well as other IT entities. 


The common denominator of all of them is the necessity to manage them and to move to garbage items which are not in use and probably will not be used in the future. For example, you have to avoid of Virtualization Sprawl by deleting unused Virtual Machines in a Cloud, you have to delete temporary files in a PC or a Server. Spam, old or not important e-mail messages are deleted. Other e-mail messages are archived. Userids and their related information are deleted or at list should be deleted when the employee or client stops working. 


Deletion and other Management Operations are done automatically or manually, but in all cases there is an owner or an administrator, who devises and performs a policy.
No one manage the Web. No one cleanup web pages except the owner of the page, who usually has no motivation for deleting web pages.  


Implications: The result of high growth rate coupled with no management is too many Web pages and too many irrelevant pages. 

• Data Reliability 

Some pages are reliable and others are not. It is not an easy task to identify the reliable and valuable pages. For information read a previous post: 

Wikimania 2011: Are Internet Sources Reliable?

Search Engines should be able to assess the reliability of Web pages. It is not an easy task.

Implications: Reliable Web Pages should appear in the top of Search Results; otherwise users will read mostly unreliable sources.
  

• Multi data types

The data is not text only. It includes Videos, Pictures and Voice etc. 
Non-text data size is a lot larger than text data size.   


Implications: Searching non-text pages is not as easy as searching text. The Search Engine has to support new search types e.g. search of Images or Videos or even multi-type search e.g. text or images sharing a common Keyword.    


Summary
The Web expansion or Entropy or exponential data growth is a major challenge for applications manipulating Web Data including Search Engines.
Semantic Web, Web 3.0, Big Data are attempts to address or minimize the effects of this problem.


The other main challenge is rating the Reliability and Value of Web Pages. Page Rank is an example of an algorithm for addressing this challenge. 


Unique Google's Challenges
In addition to the need to cope with these general challenges Google has to cope with unique challenges, due to its position as the Search market leader with approximately 80% market share.


The challenges are not as simple as using an automated or human method of multiple clicking on advertisement. They are derived from attempts to fool Google Search Engine algorithms in order to move a Web page to the beginning of search results.


The following bullets provides three frequent mechanisms for fooling Google Search Engine or at least attempting to fool it:  


1. Payment for an automated service which supposed to place a Web page in one of the first entries of Google's Search results list. 
The paid service will access the Web page artificially many times as possible, preferably from highly ranked Web sites. This method could improve the Page Rank rating and place it in higher position than it should be positioned in Google searches.


2. Adding unrelated popular labels to a Web Page labels list.
This technique could show a Web Page in Search operations unrelated to its content. It may also position it higher than it should in Search results list.   

3. Cutting and Pacing full Web Pages or parts of Web Pages from other Web sites
For example, by copying a Wikipedia article content. 
The page design may look perfect and the content could be reliable, but it attracts readers to a Web Site in which other pages are not reliable and are not well designed. Google's Search algorithm could rate the page higher than it should.
Google's Action: The Company announced recently that it will pay more for clicking advertisements in sites   having original content.  

Conclusions
Google's survival depends mainly upon two related domains: Web Search and its effective advertisement based business model.


The Web Search Engine is not as good as it was few years ago, due to Web Data exponential growth and fundamental changes of data characteristics. In addition to these factors, due to Google's dominance of this market users develop various mechanisms for fooling Google Search Engine. 


Google challenge is to adapt and evolve its Search Engine. Google may need to find new creative ways to evolve its search Engine because nobody has Web Data Control, so the data quantity and characteristics could change significantly in the future. 


As far as the Business model is concerned, it will be very difficult to replace it by entirely different model. However, the probability that an advertisement based business model will not be viable is low.


If the advertisement based business model will continue to be a viable model, Google's position will depend upon using it effectively in Search Page in conjunction with creating additional income sources from advertisement related to new services and Business Lines such as Android and You Tube TV.
     

Google: an insider's view

I recently read Steve Yegge's very interesting post cited by Rip's Rowan. According to Rip it is "The best article I've ever read about architecture and the management of IT". 


It is a very interesting post which was intended to be internal memoranda and accidently was published externally.


I read it in the right time: just after publishing in my blog a post titled: Will Google Survive until 2021? Revisited - part 1 and before publishing part 2. 

You can read it here. I recommend reading it from start to end although it is a long post. 

As a former Amazon employee and current Google employee he discusses the limitations and strengths of the two companies (more criticism than praise) and compares them to Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. 

He discusses both technological aspects, focusing on what he calls Internal SOA and  on Organizational Culture.  

Few Notes

The notes do not support or dispute Steve's views. They just summarize and clarify some aspects.

1. Google's main challenge is lack of Platform

It is a products company which developed a very successful product: Search Engine. Lack of Platform is more a Cultural issue than a Technological issue, therefore more difficult to change.

2. Other major challenge is lack of openness to third party developers.  

The lack of openness is not a technical only issue. It is mainly lack of openness to their ideas about what kind of applications to develop or what users of Electronic Social Networking Service would like to use.  

3. Lack of Accessibility is another concern. 

It can limit Service or Product use to a specific market 

share of sophisticated young people.

4. Despite Google's limitations he is loyal to 

Google because unlike Amazon its culture is  

employees friendly or makes employees feel good.  

A final note:  Google should be praised for allowing 

its employee to criticize its culture and products

internally (and unintentionally in the public). 

A corporate culture which do not shut internal criticism 

can support Innovation and Adaptation.

Will Google Survive until 2021? Revisited - part 1

Three years ago I wrote one of my Vendors Survival posts. The post was titled: Vendors Survival: Will Google Survive until 2018?
The Vendors Survival posts analyze the probability that vendors will survive for at least ten years. Most of them are about leading vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, HP, EMC etc. The previous post was on Zapthink, a small SOA and Cloud Analysts and Consultants company acquired by Dovel Systems.


Ten years predictions are usually inaccurate. However,
The only leading vendor I predicted that will not survive was SUN Microsystems, who was shortly afterwards an acquisition target for IBM and acquired by Oracle.


I recently read Google's announcement about shutting down some of its products and a similar announcement  about other products.
Shutting down products and services looks like a sign of weakening.


Some people argue that Google Social Software initiatives like Buzz, Jaiko and Google+ fails to compete with Facebook or Twitter.


Others focus on limitations of current Google Search Engine. Two examples: Why we desperately need  a New (and Better) Google, Trouble in the House of Google

Few months ago Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO. Was that change a sign that Google is no longer as successful as it was?  
So will Google preserve its position as a leader? Will it Survive for Long Term?


Google 2008 vs. Google 2011
Google of 2011 is very different from Google of 2008.
It is competing with Apple in the Smart Phone Operating Systems market with its Android (The market share of each of them is approximately 40%). 


After acquiring Motorola Mobility division it is no more Software only company but also a Smart Phones Hardware vendor. 


On the one hand Google become a successful player in the browsers market with Chrome and Gmail is a de-facto standard in the Consumer market and competing with Microsoft's Exchange in Enterprises.


On the other hand its attempts to compete with Facebook and Twitter in the Electronic Social Networking Services market are still unsuccessful.    


Threats
In order to conclude if Google will survive until 2021 we have to examine threats that could change Google's position for the Long Term. 
I do think that the threats mentioned in the post I wrote about Google Survival in 2008 are relevant. In this post I discuss or mention them briefly. 


Threat 1: Significantly better Search Engine developed by another company
The issue of Web Search Engines will be discussed in part 2 of the post.


Threat 2: Loosing its innovative spirit
The section titles: Google 2008 vs. Google 2011 indicates that probably Google is still an innovative company.


Threat 3: Expanding its business domains wrongly
Google is expanding its business domains and its business services. I do not identify indicators of wrong expansion.
Stopping business services is the other side of the coin. I do not think that Google announcement of shutting services cited in the beginning of that post is an indication of wrong strategy.


An old proverb says: The only people who never make mistakes are those who are doing nothing.
Shutting an unsuccessful service is an indication of Agile and Adapting company. Its a lot better than supporting it for years. 


Shutting a bunch of strategic services could imply a wrong strategy. However, as far as Google is concerned, it is not the case. 




Threat 4: Legal issues
This issue continues to be a relevant issue.


Threat 5: Web X.0 (X > 2)
This issue of Web Content will be discussed in a part 2 of the post, which will be published soon. 


Threat 6: failure of the simple and effective Google 
Business model
I do not observe indicators supporting failure of Google's business model.
There is a growing anxiety concerning Privacy because Google hosts more and more private data in order to select adequate advertisement.




Searching the Web 
Search Engine is Google's most strategic product. Some of its other products are using it as component of the services they provide. 


Limitation or failure of it, as described in Why we desperately need a New (and Better) Google cited in the beginning of this post, could negatively affect Google's market position.


This is the major challenge facing Google. Google has no Control of some of the factors limiting its effectiveness. 


Because addressing this challenge is so important for Google, I will dedicate a post to it. The post which will be titled same as the current post with the suffix part 2  will be published until next weekend.

Vendors Survival: Lessons from Zapthink's acquisition

Dovel Technologies is buying Zapthink. It is the first time I read about Dovel. 

Unlike Dovel, Zapthink is well known to me. As a SOA expert, I read Zapthink's analysis of SOA and other Architectural topics as well as short articles named ZapFlash. 


SOA is Zapthink's major field of expertise. The small company headed by Ronald Schmelzer and Jason Bloomberg provides SOA training and certification, SOA Consulting Services and SOA Research.


Schmelzer and Bloomberg's work reveals deep understanding and vast knowledge of SOA.


The challenges facing small Analysts and Consultants are incomparable to challenges facing a lot larger company. 
Like small software vendors many of the small Consulting and/or Market Analysis companies will not survive.


The circumstances are similar to the circumstances of smaller software vendors described in my post titled: 
Vendors Survival Guide: Supermarket Grocery and Kiosk  as well as in other Vendors Survival posts I wrote e.g. Software AG , SUN ,HP. 


Gartner, the largest IT Research company, aquired smaller companies like Meta Group, AMR Research and Dataquest and Forrester Research acquired Giga Information Web.


However, due to Zapthink's remarkable success it is interesting to analyze its acquisition and lessons we can learn from its acquisition.  


The acquisition
Dovel perspective of the acquisition emphasizes the strengthening of its SOA expertise to its USA based governmental clients. 


Jason Bloomberg's view is that the acquisition is part of Dovel's strategic plan to expand their scope, Capabilities and thought leadership in Service Oriented Architecture, Cloud Computing and related technologies as well as an opportunity to add new people to the Zapthink team three of them will be regular contributors to the ZapFlash newsletter.


Ronald Schmelzer will serve as Zapthink's consultant for few months and afterwards will be moving on. His perspective is the most interesting because he was a founder of Zapthink, because he is moving on and because he already sold ChannelWave, a Boston based software company.
  
According to citybizlist's Brian Wolak "Schmelzer is convinced that small businesses are going to dominate the landscape in the years to come, with a combination of former unemployed workers linking up with small businesses, a general backlash against big corporations, and the government's emphasis on kick-starting the economy through startups and innovation."

My Take



The success of a small consulting company highly depends upon key people.

 As far as Zapthink is concerned there are two key figures: Schmelzer and Bloomberg, so Schmelzer departure is a huge challenge. It is not easy to add or replace key figures in a small company. In case of too much success a company challenge is how to handle the large volume of tasks, while preserving the quality of deliverables. On 2007 David Linthicum joined Zapthink and was a contributor to the ZapFlash, but after a short period of time he was no longer a contributor to Zapthink efforts.

Evangelists or Thought Leaders are a must for new paradigm or a revolutionary technology not for a mature paradigm.

When the paradigm, architecture or technology is matured the number of experts who understand it or experienced it is growing and it is less a matter of Thought Leading and more a matter of actually deploying it. SOA is now Mainstream and mature. 


Dovel is a company which helps governmental agencies in USA to deploy SOA as well as other paradigms and not a Thought Leader. The new Zapthink's focus will probably be SOA implementations. 

A small company struggles to keep its position as a Thought Leader when newer paradigms or Technologies emerge.
If you are a Thought Leader in a new paradigm and a newer paradigm emerges, probably other experts will be better positioned for the newer paradigm. 
Examining the illustration following this paragraph could provide an explanation.  


New Technologies and Paradigms time overlap with older paradigms is the reason.  A Thought Leader in a relatively old paradigm is too busy in assignments related to this paradigm and therefore is lagging behind new fresh Thought Leaders of the new paradigm. 


This phenomenon is depicted in the simplified illustration beyond this line.  

The illustration depicts three related paradigms, which are not exactly comparable to each other. SOA is essentially an Enterprise Architecture. BPM is a Business Technology and Cloud Computing is more Operational approach. Cloud Computing is a general term including a variety of technologies and concepts, in different Maturity levels 


The point, which could be generalized to other paradigms and technologies, is that a small company based on one or two SOA Thought Leaders was not capable to allocate Thought Leading resources for thought leading BPM in the time BPM emerged. It was not able to allocate these resources for thought leading in Cloud Computing when it emerged.


There are many talented people, so other talented people explore the new technologies or paradigms before SOA became a mature technology and the SOA experts, saturated with many SOA related tasks, do not have the time to dive deeply into BPM or Cloud Computing.

Finally, the SOA Thought Leader have no other choice when the demand is for Cloud Computing thought leaderships, while the SOA demand is more for practical day to day skills: Architects, System Analysts and Developers etc.


But it may be too late for the SOA Thought Leader to replicate his  success: other people who started earlier in Cloud Computing are positioned better. 


Some of the SOA Thought Leaders will close the gap and become a Cloud Computing Thought Leaders, but it will take long time to do this. 


The challenge described in the last section face small companies such as Zapthink, as far as large consulting companies are concerned they can allocate enough resources: some potential Thought Leaders could  specialize in the new paradigm (e.g. Cloud Computing), while others take care of a previous buzz such as SOA.



  

PAAS is not Mainstream yet

In a previous post titled Hyped Cloud Technologies Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tied in the fourth place in a ReadWrite Cloud survey of Hyped Cloud Technologies.


Yesterday, I read a Forrester Research Note about PaaS, which may explain why it is rated as one of the most Hyped Cloud Technologies.   
Simply, PaaS is immature technology. 


Immature technologies related to in the spotlight topic such as Cloud Computing, are natural hype candidates.    


PaaS and IaaS
PaaS and IaaS are related concepts: both provide technology for development and deployment of applications in the Cloud.


IaaS solutions such as Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3 provide basic platform for Application Development and Application Deployment. It is only infrastructure.


Unlike IaaS, PaaS provides a complete Application Platform which includes Development Tools (e.g    Integrated Development Environment), Runtime Environment and Management tools. 


Developing Applications in IaaS environment is a lot more difficult task than developing them in a PaaS environment.  IaaS inferiority derived from the necessity to develop Applications Platform components which are missing in IaaS environments and hopefully are available in PaaS environmnets. 


Forrester Research explains the difficulty of developing in IaaS in the following words: " You have to worry about the details of Virtual machines, storage blocks, execution threads and network connections". 
However, people often use IaaS because it is a mature technology and PaaS is not mature yet.


PaaS Immaturity indicators 
The Forrester Wave(TM):Platform as a Service For App Dev and Delivery Professionals, Q2 2011 written by Forrester Analysts John R. Rymmer and Stephan Ried Ph.D with Mike Gilpin, Andrew Magarie and Alissa Anderson name SalesForce.com and Microsoft as Leaders and Cordys, Longjump, Wavemaker and Google as Strong Performer. Tibco Software is the only vendor listed as Contender.


Only two Leaders is an indicator of immaturity.


The small number of vendors listed is another immaturity sign.


The list of vendors which were not listed is another immaturity indicator: 
IBM, Red Hat (Jboss) and VMware were not listed because they enter the PaaS market in spring 2011. 
Oracle and SAP did not enter the PaaS market yet.


Last but not least, most of PaaS vendors listed are small companies who are not market leaders in other markets. The result is, according to Forrester Research, that Microsoft's Windows Azure, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com's Force.com are the only products which get significant attention and adoption. Many potential customers neglect PaaS and use Amazon's IaaS products or wait.    
        

Hyped Cloud Technologies

What are the most Hyped Cloud Technologies? This was the question asked in a survey of ReadWrite Cloud readers. 

As no details about the sample characteristics are disclosed the results couls be misleading.
The results could be biased due to some of the following factors:


1. the number of people surveyed is unknown and could be too small for supporting any conclusion.


2. The sample could be biased. Do not forget that the site is sponsored by Intel and VMware and therefore you may find relatively more customers of these companies.


3. No sample characteristics were defined, so the people answering the survey questions voluntarily may not represent the whole population.

The Results
The most hyped Cloud technologies were in decending order:
1. NOSQL
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
3. Private Clouds
4-5. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
4-5. Platform as a Service (PaaS)


Least Hyped technologies were Infrastructure Apps and API and Data as a Service.


According to ReadWrite, the findings about NOSQL, Private Clouds and Platform as a Service, were as expected and the surprising findings are the relatively high hype rating of SaaS and Infrastructure as a Service.  


My Take
I do not know if it is possible to conclude anything from the survey's findings, due to possible biases and possible small smaple size mentioned in previous section.

Even if it is possible, nobody should confuse between hyped technology and technology which is not yet matured. 


I am sure that Software as a Service is a mature technology (read for example a previous post: SaaS is Going Mainstream). SalesForce.com technologies and Google Apps are not the only successful SaaS technologies. However, advertising products which has nothing to do with a new technology or concept, as if it is an implenebtation of successful new trends and concepts occurs frequenty.  


This  phenomenon generates a lot of hype. 
It takes time until the technology is implemented in most enterprises and/or consumers and then hyping is more difficult.


I remember similar hyping pattern related to other concepts such as SOA and Object Oriented. 
Instead of a lot of hype about SOA three years ago you can find now a lot of enterprises and service providers looking for SOA Architects. 


NOSQL is newer concept than SaaS, therefore rating it as one of the most hyped Cloud Technologies is natural.


Never the less, there are NOSQL success stories.
 I recently read how Wix found that the best way to implement NOSQL dor their product was implementing a single large MYSQL table. This interesting Case Study demonstrates both NOSQL immaturity and ease of Hyping (by others not by Wix).


Private Cloud Technology is a different story.
There are still arguments if it is a technology at all or just another incarnation of Utility Computing or hyping of Public Clouds success.